Netflix Now Available on (Some) Android Phones

While Netflix has been available on iOS since last year, it's been conspicuously absent on the arguably most popular smartphone OS, Android. By finally releasing an Android application late last week, Netflix is moving closer to their goal of being on every platform. But their Android release is a perfect example of the fragmentation issues plaguing Android, as their app is currently only available on five specific phones:

The Android platform is gaining rapid adoption in the mobile world and presents a great opportunity to reach more of our members. Because the platform has evolved so rapidly, there are some significant challenges associated with developing a streaming video application for this ecosystem. One of these challenges is the lack of standard streaming playback features that the Netflix application can use to gain broad penetration across all available Android phones. In the absence of standardization, we have to test each individual handset and launch only on those that can support playback. We are aggressively qualifying phones and look forward to expanding the list of phones on which the Netflix app will be supported. We anticipate that many of these technical challenges will be resolved in the coming months and that we will be able to provide a Netflix application that will work on a large majority of Android phones.

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